Installing the Official AMD driver

Requirements

The AMD-supplied driver will work best in most cases if there is no xorg.conf file present before you begin the installation process. Move any existing xorg.conf files out of the /etc/X11 directory before installation.

You will need version 11.11 of the ATI driver or later for Fedora 16, earlier versions will not work with the version of XOrg that F16 ships with.

You require a Radeon HD2000 series or better to use the latest AMD-supplied driver.

Compilation Problems on x86_64 Fedora 16

Note: This section applies directly to users using the Official amd-driver-installer package downloaded from amd.com

Due to an upstream sourcecode change in the Fedora kernel-headers package, building of AMD's fglrx module will currently fail with kernels 3.2.9-2.fc16 and later. If you are getting the following error in your /usr/share/ati/fgrlx-install.log:

Multiple Monitor Setups

If you have an existing multiple monitor setup, move your existing xorg.conf to a safe place. Let the amd-driver-installer generate a fresh working xorg.conf file for you based on what it probes from EDID monitor info, If you are having difficulties after generating a new xorg.conf, use your old xorg.conf as a reference and transfer sections of that file as needed to the new one.

Here are some resources for those having difficulty getting their multiple monitors running:

If you need to start with a clean slate and all your monitors are connected, you can force a fresh xorg.conf to be generated taking into account the monitors present:

su -
aticonfig --initial -f

Pre-built packages from RPMFusion

Note: This section does not apply to users using the Official amd-driver-installer package downloaded from amd.com

RECOMMENDED METHOD

This is easier than manually building the driver from AMD as you don't need to worry about passing kernel options via GRUB2, configuring DKMS, rebuilding the kernel module every time you do a kernel upgrade, or cleaning up any mess if you want to remove the driver.

Clean up previous Offical AMD driver installation

If you're coming from the Official AMD driver to RPMFusion's AMD driver, you'll need to reinstall the mesa-libGL package as the Official AMD driver installation changes files it contains.

If you want to play 32-bit games on a 64-bit Fedora installation, you will need to install the 32-bit libraries in addition to the above step.

su -
yum install xorg-x11-drv-catalyst-libs.i686

Kernel module packages

Note that there are individual kmod-catalyst- packages in RPMFusion which supply kernel modules for specific Fedora kernel versions. If you use these and you upgrade the kernel without upgrading the kmod-catalyst- package, loading the proprietary driver will fail and you'll revert back to the Free radeon graphics driver. Sometimes there is a day or so between Fedora upgrading their kernel and RPMFusion building a new kmod-catalyst- package.

The akmod-catalyst package we installed above automatically builds a new kernel module at boot-time when the kernel is upgraded, so you'll never have to worry about this.

Official AMD Driver Package from Amd.com

Note: This section applies directly to users using the Official amd-driver-installer package downloaded from amd.com

Preinstall required packages

The script from AMD builds the kernel module and a set of modules for XOrg. The Official AMD installer requires some development packages to be installed:

su -
yum install kernel-devel kernel-headers gcc gcc-c++

We'll also want to remove any kernel-devel packages from old versions of the kernel. Check your current kernel version with:

uname -a

Check all installed kernel packages with

su -
rpm -qa | grep kernel

Remove any kernel-devel packages which do not match the latest kernel version. For example:

su -
yum remove kernel-devel-3.2.9-1.fc16.x86_64

Note we are careful to specify the exact package name that was given to us by the rpm command above.

Boot into the latest kernel before continuing. Building the module on a kernel which you don't have -devel packages for will fail. Building the module on one kernel then booting into another will result in the compiled module not working.

Uninstalling Official AMD driver

Run AMD's uninstall script:

su -
sh /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh

The following steps are not strictly required because the amd-driver-installer is written to put all files back as they were before the install. One set of files that amd-driver-installer alters is the mesa library set. To be sure of a mint-condition installation (especially if you are upgrading to the next Official driver version) reinstall the following package:

su -
yum reinstall mesa-libGL

For those running Wine or Crossover from Codeweavers.com, the following command will reinstall all the mesa libraries that (should) be on your system. This example is for users running Wine/Crossover on a 64 bit system: